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Show Chapter XI. Xenophobia and Moral Anomaly 460 resistance toward others; and a belief that there is everything to be gained, and nothing to be protected, from exploration of another person's singularity.10 We often see this belief expressed in the behavior of very young children, who touch, poke, prod, probe and question one without inhibition, as though in knowledge of another there were nothing to fear. What they are lacking, it seems, is contingent empirical evidence to the contrary. 7. Xenophilia and Aesthetic Anomaly In those of us for whom 5.(B) is the right interpretation of our cognitive attitude toward anomalous others, contemporary art offers a training ground for cultivating the xenophilic disposition to inquiry by which we may temper the refined xenophobic excesses of higher-order political discrimination. I do not mean to suggest that works of art are capable of curing higher-order political discrimination. As we have seen, higher-order political discrimination is supervenient on first-order political discrimination; and first-order political discriminators are ashamed, not of their political discrimination, but of themselves as inadequate to the honorific stereotypes they reciprocally impose on themselves. In so far as a higher-order political discriminator retains a personal investment in that honorific stereotype, she will be unpersuaded by its deleterious effects on others to renounce it. This means that it is not just her cognitive habits that are in need of reform, but her more central conception of herself. This is a task for social reconditioning or psychotherapy, not art. Nevertheless, art has an important role to play in intensifying a viewer's self-awareness of these matters. Art can highlight pseudorational failures of cognitive discrimination as themselves objects of aesthetic examination; and it can heighten a viewer's level of cognitive sensitivity to a wide range of complex situations, of which political discrimination is only one. In the contemporary setting, galleries and museums announce themselves to the public as arenas in which cognitive alertness is required, and in which the viewer's capacity to understand and situate an anomalous object in its singularly appropriate context will be tested. In earlier historical periods, galleries and museums had different roles: pedagogical or inspirational, for example. But in this one, their primary role, and the role of the art works they exhibit, is to challenge the limitations of the viewer's Thus xenophilia in the sense I am defining it should be distinguished from a superficially similar, but in fact deeply perverse form of xenophobia, in which the xenophobe reinforces her honorific, stereotypical self-conception by treating the other as an exotic object of research, whom (like a rare species of insect) it is permissible to examine and dissect from a superior vantage-point of inviolate disingenuity. By contrast, the xenophile acknowledges the disruption and threat to the integrity of the self caused by the other's difference, and seeks understanding of the other as a way of understanding and transcending the limitations of her own self-conception. 10 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
